Bar code blooper at IRS
By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 3/1/1998
It pays to pay attention to what you put into a bar code symbol. That's proving to be true for an arm of the Government that we've all been paying for years-the Internal Revenue Service.The IRS, it seems, sent out a million packets with form 1040 and related forms to some U.S. taxpayers with incorrect bar codes on the preprinted mailing labels. The bar code facilitates high-speed sortation of mail by the U.S. Postal Service.
The incorrect bar code contains the individual taxpaper's own Zip-coded address designator instead of the code to designate a specific IRS regional tax form processing center. A printing contractor hired by the IRS made the mistake on packets with forms 1040-5 and 1040-10 sent to taxpayers along the East and West coasts.
Thus, if USPS machines try to read the incorrect label on a returned form, what's read will be the taxpayer's own Zip code instead of the processing center's Zip code.
Since discovering the mistake, IRS has sent out packets with correct labels to taxpayers.
What this IRS "bar code blooper" points up, of course, is not that the technology is at fault or flawed; it was the IRS contractor's mistake.
To learn more about avoiding such automatic data collection mistakes, you can turn your Web browser to the ADC News & Solutions site, adcnews.com. Columnist Ivan Jeanblanc reports on some other notable bloopers.
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